EXCLUSIVE: As the Sundance deal avalanche abates, it is time to focus on the film packages to be unveiled next week in Berlin. In what instantly becomes a hot property there, Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson are finalizing deals to star this fall in R…

Paul led and produced the Hulu series “The Path” for its three-season run and is currently shooting the upcoming Apple drama “Are You Sleeping” opposite Octavia Spencer and Lizzy Kaplan. He recently starred in “American Woman” opposite Sienna Miller, which just premiered at TIFF. He will next be seen starring opposite Mary Elizabeth Winstead in “The Parts You Lose,” from director Chris Cantwell.

Based on the film of the same name written by Michael Crichton, “Westworld” was created by husband and wife producing team Nolan and Joy. The two act as showrunners and executive produce with J.J. Abrams, Richard J. Lewis, Roberto Patino, Athena Wickham and Ben Stephenson. The series is produced by Nolan and Joy’s Kilter Films and Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television.

This story about “Westworld” first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s Emmy magazine.

“Westworld” showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy know that some fans found Season 2 to be more of a head-scratcher than Season 1. And that is saying something, since the first year of the HBO sci-fi hit made such an impact with audiences because of its twists and turns.

But the criticisms and confusion lobbed at the Evan Rachel Wood-led show were to be expected, as Nolan and Joy said they make the show on their own terms and took more than a few big swings in their sophomore year.

“The only way I know to write the show is to write it for ourselves,” Nolan said of the drama, which received 21 Emmy nominations, tying it with “Saturday Night Live” and trailing only “Game of Thrones” as the most-nominated program. “You make the show that you want to see and hope that there are enough people in the audience that are excited to see it. And that seems to be where we’re at.”

Joy echoed her husband and co-creator’s feelings, saying she’s “thrilled” with the way Season 2 turned out, especially because of the storyline for Wood, who plays a sweet rancher’s daughter turned gunslinging robot-army leader.

“In addition to being able to do a story that has long interested me about a woman who comes to power and has to navigate her own personality and choices, I think it’s really fascinating right now in society,” Joy said. “It’s a thing we as a society are trying to navigate.”

“Westworld” devoted a lot of its second season, which Nolan said was shot in “significantly less time than we shot the first season,” to locations in other theme parks adjacent to Westworld. One of those was Shogun World, which had almost an entire episode devoted to it.

“That was very, very exciting for us to do an homage to Akira Kurosawa’s work, and the influence Kurosawa’s work had on Western TV,” Nolan said of the legendary Japanese director of “Rashomon” and “Seven Samurai.”

“This is where our show becomes really fun for us,” he continued. “It’s about references. It’s about cinema. It’s about genre.”

And it’s also about HBO. “I think you’ve got a lot of people making ambitious television right now, but HBO kind of invented it,” Nolan said. “‘Game of Thrones’ blazed this trail for massive productions and ambition on television. Really cinematic television. It created this extraordinary opportunity for us to create a show that is this challenging.”

You can more from our interview with the “Westworld” creators — in which they preview Season 3 — here.

(Spoiler alert: Please do not read ahead unless you’ve watched “Westworld” through the Season 2 finale.)

“Westworld” Season 2 won’t look like anything to you when the third installment of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s hit HBO sci-fi series rolls around. Well, we can only assume, seeing as it sounds like what many critics and fans thought was a convoluted sophomore year compared to the already-complicated freshman venture, is a walk in the Western-themed park compared to what the married co-creators tell TheWrap they are cooking up next.

“Yes, Season 3 of ‘Westworld’ is definitely going to be a big undertaking,” Nolan told TheWrap, while discussing the 21 Emmy nominations the drama received this year — including nods for Outstanding Drama, and actors Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright, Thandie Newton, Ed Harris and Jimmi Simpson.

“Yes, it is our biggest undertaking as of yet,” Joy added. “But the great thing about Season 3 is, when we were writing the pilot, the major storyline for Season 3 was already something that we had talked about nonstop. We’ve been waiting to get to this place and now that we’ve arrived here, we already have a very strong idea of exactly where we want to go and we can’t wait to go there.”

“It’s funny, we took our first vacation in over four years recently,” Joy continued. “And the problem with ‘Westworld,’ is you never leave ‘Westworld.’ So we were sitting there with our family on a beach and, of course we were discussing the nature of consciousness and the world of possibility and how an artificial intelligence would want to change society. So I guess you could say we never stop working on ‘Westworld.’”

Alright, obviously Joy and Nolan weren’t prepared to give up any real details about Season 3 — which does not yet have a premiere or production start date — and that includes their nickname for it. Oh, in case you aren’t a die-hard “Westworld” fan, the co-showrunners have a habit of giving their seasons a secret moniker they reveal later on, with the first being “The Door” and the second ‘The Maze.”

“Oh, we’ve figured that out,” told us of the code word for Season 3. “We’re just not quite ready to share yet,” Nolan said.

“We’ve got a long, long year in terms of writing and pulling together the pieces for the third season,” Nolan added. “I think what’s fun for us about this is discovering this world could be kind of extraordinary like this. And an opportunity — you know, if the show has spoken metaphorically about our world at this point, then the opportunity to visit our world is very exciting for us on both a character level and a story level.”

Oh, and speak of characters. When we talked to Joy about the Season 2 finale, we tried to get her to crack on which five hosts might be inside those control units Dolores/Hale (Tessa Thompson) smuggled out into the real world. Well, we checked in on that and here’s the answer we got: “Characters portrayed by brilliant actors!” Oh, geez. Thanks, guy.

Westworld got stuck dragging its boots a bit in season two, an unfortunate side-effect of the twisting timelines and various different factions that are all trying to get to the same place, but things did start to move at a decent clip once it got to t…

If you’re a fan of mindscrew TV shows that failed to stick the landing, you might be worried “Westworld” is being made up as it goes along. But that’s not the case, says Lisa Joy.

In fact, the HBO show’s co-creator says it would have been “irresponsible” not to have the ending mapped-out in advance.

“We have an ending in mind; we’ve had it from the pilot. It’s very emotional, I think,” Joy told Stuff.com New Zealand. “I can’t tell you exactly when that ending will come… but I think for every season what we try to do is tell a chapter of the story that gives you closure and then opens a door to a new chapter. The overarching question of the series is, what will become of this new lifeform? So I feel it would be irresponsible to not have an end goal in mind.”

So at minimum, there’s probably not a “it was purgatory all along” ending in store when the show freezes motor functions for the last time.

If you’re dying to know what’s next after the insane Season 2 finale, you’re in luck. In a June interview, Joy told TheWrap a little about what to expect when the show (eventually) returns for its third season.

“It was always the plan to explore the real world and we have Dolores there, Bernard’s there and a creature that is certainly inhabiting Hale’s body is there,” said Joy. “So we’ll come to know more of who ‘Hale’ is. There are three Hosts out in the world and next season will really be an exploration of what they find and who they become.”

After Sunday’s Season 2 finale, HBO will freeze all “Westworld” functions for at least a year — but did the drama’s sophomore run finish better than it began?

This past weekend, Episode 210 earned 1.6 million linear viewers, according to Nielsen, which is down 24 percent in total eyeballs from its debut this spring. HBO added another 600,000 viewers via an encore and its HBO Go and Now streams, per the pay-TV channel, bringing the nightly total up to 2.2 million.

“Westworld” Season 2 premiered back in April to 2.1 million linear viewers, per Nielsen, which was actually 100,000 audience members slimmer than the show’s Season 1 finale. Counting an encore as well as HBO Go and Now streams, that night’s sum grew to 3 million overall viewers.

“Westworld” sees a lot of delayed viewing. Last season, the TV reimagining of the 1973 feature film saw nearly 80 percent of its viewers tune in post-premiere night, according to HBO. The premium cabler is expecting a Season 2 average of around 10 million viewers once all data has come in.

Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s HBO sci-fi series closed its sophomore run with a feature-length finale, titled “The Passenger,” which answered many a question we’d been pondering throughout the sophomore year of, but left viewers with a whole new mess of head-scratchers, like that Bernard (Jeffrey Wright)/Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood)/Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) murder-resurrection triangle; Ford’s (Anthony Hopkins) final fate; Maeve (Thandie Newton) and the other dead Hosts’ chances of being revived; the “real world” setting we’re entering in Season 3; and what in the heck was going on with the Man in Black/William (Ed Harris) in that unexpected post-credits scene.

You can read our full interview with Joy about the Season 2 finale here. And everything we currently know about Season 3 here.

(The mother of all spoiler alerts: Please do not read ahead unless you’ve seen the “Westworld” Season 2 finale, “The Passenger,” which aired Sunday.)

Do you feel like someone pulled your control unit out of your head after watching the “Westworld” Season 2 finale — including that wild post-credits scene? Of course you do. So what do you do next? Start scouring the internet for hints about the third installment, obviously.

While the details we have on the next season of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s HBO sci-fi series are few and far between, we have been able to roundup a few tidbits that should tide you over for at least as long as it takes Dolores to get through one of her famous speeches about “the world.”

At the end of the Season 2 finale, “The Passenger,” three of the Hosts officially entered the real world in our central timeline: Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) — thanks to Dolores’ decision to bring him back — and whoever the heck is inside the Charlotte Hale-shaped one (played by Tessa Thompson) that Dolores inhabited before she rebuilt herself.

“It was always the plan to explore the real world and we have Dolores there, Bernard’s there and a creature that is certainly inhabiting Hale’s body is there [laughs],” Joy told TheWrap. “So we’ll come to know more of who ‘Hale’ is. There are three Hosts out in the world and next season will really be an exploration of what they find and who they become.”

Joy also clarified that there is someone in Hale who isn’t Dolores at the end there, cause Dolores is now back in Dolores, saying, “Yes, that’s one of the things we’ll explore next season.”

We’ve seen Westworld, The Raj and Shogun World, but we know we have some more Delos Destinations to explore. “Well, not all of our favorite characters have managed to escape yet, so…,” Nolan said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly published after the finale. Yeah, OK, so more parks next time.

Look, you saw how many people died in the finale, so it shouldn’t come as a shock based on the sheer number of casualties that not every star will be sticking with the series when it returns.

“We’ve had some interesting conversations,” Nolan told EW. “It’s a large ensemble cast and sadly we’re saying goodbye to some people at the end of this season. But as always with this show, who remains and who doesn’t is something we’re having a lot of fun with. There’s going to be a bit of a wait for a third season but we want to surprise and hopefully delight people with the way things progress.”

6. The Hosts that “sublimed” into the Valley Beyond are most likely gone for good.

Teddy, Akecheta (Zach McClarnon) and a few other lucky robots made it into their version of paradise, and Joy made it clear to TheWrap that Dolores has changed the coordinates of the Sublime to keep them away from humans forever.

“I think what she’s done is she fulfilled their wish,” Joy told TheWrap. “They wanted to escape to a digital space where they could be truly free and create their own world, untarnished by human interference. And in changing the coordinates and kind of locking in and stowing them away, Dolores has finally found a way to accept their choice and give them what they so desired.”

Joy told us that that crazy post-credits scene that scrambled your brain even more than the finale itself takes place at a later date than the rest of the story. A much later date.

“But he’s in a very different timeline,” Joy said. “The whole place looks destroyed, and then she explains that all of that stuff happened long ago. That was real. But now something has happened and the Man is now the subject — or some iteration of the Man is now the subject — of testing. The roles have become completely reversed.

“And we get the feeling that, in the far-flung future, the Man has been somehow reconjured and brought into this world and he’s being tested the same way the humans used to test the Hosts. And that is a storyline that one day we’ll see more of.”

Nolan told Entertainment Weekly you shouldn’t expect any fresh episodes anytime soon, noting: “We’re still talking it through, honestly, with our friends at HBO, and with the cast and the crew. We want to take the time to make every season as exciting as possible. And we have an enormous challenge going into Season 3 with the worlds that we’re building going forward. We want to make sure we have the time to do that right.”

Part of the problem here is also the fact HBO hasn’t set a premiere date for the eighth and final season of “Game of Thrones,” which we do know is coming in 2019. Chances are the premium cable network won’t want to air “Westworld” before it says goodbye to its most popular series, so you do the math.

You can read our full interview with Joy about the Season 2 finale here.

(The mother of all spoiler alerts: Please do not read ahead unless you’ve seen the “Westworld” Season 2 finale, “The Passenger,” which aired Sunday.)

“Westworld” is no longer set in Westworld. At least not completely.

At the end of the Season 2 finale, “The Passenger,” three of the Hosts officially entered the real world in our central timeline: Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) — thanks to Dolores’ decision to bring him back — and whoever the heck is inside the Charlotte Hale-shaped one (played by Tessa Thompson) that Dolores inhabited before she rebuilt herself.

And co-creator Lisa Joy tells TheWrap that trio are going to be outside the park for the foreseeable future. Yes, that means you’ll be getting a taste of whatever not-so-distant-future the HBO sci-fi series is set in during Season 3.

Here is what Joy told us about the third installment of her and Jonathan Nolan’s drama, which doesn’t have a premiere date yet.

TheWrap: OK, is it safe to assume that going forward in the next season we’ll be in the real world more?

Joy: Absolutely. It was always the plan to explore the real world and we have Dolores there, Bernard’s there and a creature that is certainly inhabiting Hale’s body is there [laughs]. So we’ll come to know more of who “Hale” is. There are three Hosts out in the world and next season will really be an exploration of what they find and who they become.

TheWrap: So then there has to be someone in Hale who isn’t Dolores at the end there, cause Dolores is now back in Dolores — right?

Joy: Yes, that’s one of the things we’ll explore next season.

You can read our full interview with Joy about the Season 2 finale here.

(The mother all spoiler alerts: Please do not read ahead unless you’ve seen the “Westworld” Season 2 finale, “The Passenger,” which aired Sunday.)

Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, probably still shame on you, because making “Westworld” fans think Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) is gone for good yet again, and then bringing him back once more would be just plain mean.

But after the insane “Westworld” Season 2 finale, Lisa Joy assured TheWrap Ford has really and truly been deleted from Bernard’s (Jeffrey Wright) brain and her and Jonathan Nolan’s HBO sci-fi series. Well, like, that version of Ford.

During the episode, titled “The Passenger,” Bernard had several exchanges with his old partner, who had been hanging out inside the Host’s brain for the better part of the back half of the season. And that was a little weird, seeing as it seemed Bernard had “deleted” Ford from his brain in the season’s penultimate episode, only for him to pop back up at the beginning of this one.

But come the end of the finale, Bernard realizes the scenes with his imaginary friend really were imaginary this time round, and Ford is out. For real.

Look, just read what Joy said to us and you decide for yourselves if he’ll be back in Season 3.

TheWrap: Now, since we saw Bernard realize he had been imagining Ford at the end there and was really doing all of those things by himself, does that mean Ford is gone for good this time?

Joy: Yes, Ford is gone. And yeah, I think it’s really — it’s interesting, because remember how in the first season with Dolores, in trying to come to consciousness she would hear Arnold’s voice while doing these things? And part of her embracing her agency and consciousness is realizing, “There is that voice. That’s not necessarily yours, that’s my voice. That’s my inner voice. And I have to achieve my own inner voice and inner instincts.” And embracing that voice is what brought her to full personhood.

And meanwhile, Jeffrey Wright’s character, Bernard, has been kind of struggling on his own. He didn’t even know he was a Host, because he was kind of very fragile when he was masquerading amongst the humans, so by the end of the season, you’re absolutely right, he manages to get rid of Ford — who did plant himself there as an emergency stopgap measure within the park to be upload into Bernard’s brain.

But once Bernard, who is an excellent coder, has ridden himself of Ford, he’s gone. And what we’re left with now is really a story about one Host, a new Host, kind of blooming into consciousness, who embraces his own inner voice, which he realizes has been guiding him in all the last major moves he’s made to ensure the future of his kind.

You can read our full interview with Joy about the Season 2 finale here.

(Warning: All of the spoilers for the end of “Westworld” Season 2 below! Read on at your own risk!)

“Westworld” Season 2 ended with yet another series of crazy, possibly confusing twists, bringing together multiple timelines and finally explaining what the deal is with Bernard, Dolores, and the Valley Beyond.

Especially in the last 20 minutes, the “Westworld” Season 2 finale dumps a whole lot of information on viewers, and it’s easy to possibly be a little lost. Here’s a quick rundown of what happened with every character, and what the end of Season 2 means for Season 3.

First, there’s the past timeline, one week before the Delos extraction team arrived at “Westworld” and found Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) on the beach in the season’s first episode. In that timeline, Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) blew off the hand of the Man in Black (Ed Harris), and then she and Bernard headed down into the Forge, the Westworld facility also known as the Valley Beyond to the hosts.

In the Forge, Bernard discovered that he and Ford (Anthony Hopkins) had created a virtual Eden world (what the show calls the “Sublime) inside the same computer that has been copying all the guests who’ve entered the park, in order to attempt to copy human minds into host bodies — an experiment in immortality. Bernard and Dolores entered the simulation, where Dolores learned some key facts about human nature and behavior from the copied human minds, which Ford thought she could use to survive in the real world. Bernard, meanwhile, opened the Door, the gateway into the Sublime, which automatically downloaded the hosts who passed through it into the computer system. That’s why, at the start of the season, there were all those host bodies floating around inside the flooded valley. The hosts’ bodies die, but their minds live on in the computer simulation.

Bernard, knowing that Dolores would try to kill all the humans, killed her instead. Later, though, when Hale (Tessa Thompson) killed Elsie (Shannon Woodward) because she didn’t think she could trust Elsie not to reveal the immortality project, Bernard changed his mind and decided that he needed Dolores. He asked the copy of Ford from the Cradle, the one inside his mind that previously took over Bernard’s body, for help, and Ford walked him through what to do.

Bernard built a copy of Hale’s body as a host, since all her data had been saved by the immortality project, but put Dolores’ control unit in that body. Dolores was reborn, but inside a copy of Hale — and then Dolores killed Hale (and the last of her security guys). Bernard also hid the Abernathy control unit, the key that grants access to the Forge system, so no one would know where it was.

When everything was finished, Bernard realized that the copy of Ford he’d been talking to since he killed Dolores wasn’t really Ford — it was Bernard imagining Ford. In Season 1, Ford talked about how Arnold was trying to get the hosts to hear their own voices as internal monologue, instead of someone else’s voice giving them instructions. Bernard realized that, in imagining Ford, he’d truly and finally achieved his own free will.

He also knew that when Delos’ extraction team eventually showed up, they would figure out that Bernard was a host and scan his control unit, viewing all his memories. When that happened, the humans would be able to undo everything Bernard had done, from recreating Dolores to saving the park’s hosts in the computer simulation. To prevent that from happening, Bernard scrambled up his own memories from the past 20 years. That’s why he kept getting confused as to when things were happening in the later timeline, and why Costa (Fares Fares), the Delos technician, couldn’t find the location of the Abernathy control unit by scanning Bernard’s robot brain.

In the second timeline, a week after Bernard first got into the Forge, Dolores was in the Hale body and still needed the Abernathy control unit, but Bernard had hidden it and then scrambled his brain. Dolores posed as Hale — maybe better identified now as “Halores” — and met up with Strand (Gustaf Skarsgard) and Costa from the extraction team to try to find the control unit, planning to use Hale’s identity to get out of Westworld. When they finally got to the Forge and Bernard remembered everything, Halores killed the extraction team and got the Abernathy control unit back from where Bernard had hidden it.

Dolores then uploaded the mind of Teddy (James Marsden) into the Sublime program; at the start of the episode, we see Dolores has removed Teddy’s his control unit from his body after he shot himself. Then, she used the satellite transmitter the extraction team brought to upload the Sublime program and all the hosts to one of the satellites, to protect it from anyone ever finding it. All the hosts who were uploaded into the Sublime are free and safe, living out their lives in a computer program where no one can hurt them.

On the beach, the surviving Delos folks started looking to see what hosts they can salvage. Lutz (Leonardo Nam) and Sylvester (Ptolemy Slocum) the two technicians who’ve been with Maeve (Thandie Newton), were tasked with helping out. It’s heavily implied the pair are going to try to save Maeve, suggesting she’ll be back for Season 3 with their help. We also see that the Man in Black survived his ordeal and was leaving Westworld, although that doesn’t answer the question of whether he was a host.

Halores, having found the Abernathy control unit and pretending to be Hale, headed to the beach to leave Westworld. She had a quick interaction with Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), who basically revealed he knows she’s really a host, but let her go anyway (Joy also answered TheWrap’s questions about that conversation). On the mainland, Halores went to Arnold’s old house, where Ford left one last helpful surprise: a machine for making hosts. Halores created a new Dolores body for herself. Then she made a new Bernard body and resurrected him, even though she knows they’ll be enemies. The question now is, whose control unit is in the Hale host body, and what other hosts might Dolores have made with the machine?

Finally, there’s that post-credits scene, which shows another timeline altogether from what we’ve seen so far in the season. The Man in Black takes the elevator down into the Forge, only to discover that he’s not in the Forge at all. A host that looks like his daughter Emily (Katja Herbers) gave him the same treatment the Man gave the host version of James Delos (Peter Mullan) earlier in the season. The destruction around the facility suggests that scene is way in the future, and that there’s a host copy of the Man in Black, much like there was a host copy of James Delos. Joy also answered our questions about the post-credits scene and illuminated it quite a bit. It’s not clear who’s running that program and why, but it could be that the Forge system Bernard and Dolores met has plans of its own.

So what does that all mean for Season 3? We know there are at least some hosts still out in the world, and Dolores and Bernard are going to be at odds. Maeve is probably coming back, and so is the Man in Black. And even with all that, there are bound to be more multiple, confusing timelines — and this is far from the end of Delos, Westworld, or their experiments.

(The mother all spoiler alerts: Please do not read ahead unless you’ve seen the “Westworld” Season 2 finale, “The Passenger,” which aired Sunday.)

Well that was odd.

Toward the end of “Westworld”s Season 2 finale, “The Passenger,” one of the strangest exchanges that viewers have ever witnessed on Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s HBO sci-fi series occurred between Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) and Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson). Or rather, Stubbs and “Halores” had a bizarre conversation, as Evan Rachel Wood’s character was really inhabiting a new skin that looked just like Hale.

And while TheWrap was busy wondering if the theme park’s head of security had figured that out, as he stopped Hale on the beach to have a little chat as she was trying to leave, we totally missed the real twist there. Yeah, Stubbs is a host. And we even have the interview with Joy to prove it.

TheWrap: When Halores left the beach, it seemed like Stubbs new it was Dolores — or at least that it wasn’t Hale. Is that safe to assume?

Joy: Yes! It is safe to assume. And there is a step further that you can assume too. And we don’t say it explicitly, but if you are left wondering with all [Stubbs’] talk, his knowing talk about, “I’ve been at the park a very long time,” and Ford (Anthony Hopkins) designed him with certain core drives, and he’s gonna stick to the role he’s been programmed with; it’s a little acknowledgement of just why he might have his suspicions about what’s going on with Hale, and then lets her pass.

And doesn’t it make sense if you are Ford and designing a park and you have a whole master plan about helping robots that you would keep one Host hiding in plain sight as a fail-safe? Maybe the Host who’s in charge of quality assurance? And by the way, that was totally meant to be subtle [laughs].

You can read our full interview with Joy about the Season 2 finale here.

(The mother all spoiler alerts: Please do not read ahead unless you’ve seen the “Westworld” Season 2 finale, “The Passenger,” which aired Sunday.)

OK, a lot of Hosts were either dead or had crossed into the “Valley Beyond” aka the Sublime by the end of the “Westworld” Season 2 finale. But there are at least three robots still standing: Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) and whoever the heck is inside the Charlotte Hale-shaped one (played by Tessa Thompson) that Dolores inhabited before she rebuilt herself. (We’re not counting those guys in the post-credits scene. That’s a whole different can of worms.)

Oh, wait, there are also five Hosts’ consciousnesses inside the five control units that “Halores” smuggled into the real world when exiting the park at the end of Sunday’s season-closer. And while we don’t know for certain who is inside each of those little pearls, TheWrap prodded co-creator Lisa Joy to give us some idea of which dead Hosts — RIP Maeve (Thandie Newton) & co — Dolores is planning on reconstructing and which were sent off into the ether. And actually, where exactly that ether is.

TheWrap: Where exactly did Dolores send the Hosts who went into the Sublime when she changed the coordinates?

Joy: I think what she’s done is she fulfilled their wish. They wanted to escape to a digital space where they could be truly free and create their own world, untarnished by human interference. And in changing the coordinates and kind of locking in and stowing them away, Dolores has finally found a way to accept their choice and give them what they so desired.

TheWrap: After the guest data in the Forge is erased, Hale/Dolores leaves with five control units in a purse. Who is in them? Maeve? Armistice? And can “Halores” remake them then?

Joy: There is Host data in the actual hosts who did not Sublime — so their CPUs are still intact. So, if they didn’t “sublime,” those pearls still contain their information. In each of those little balls in the purse is a Host, so there is a handful of them — but not an infinite amount of them. There are five. One Host per pearl.

You can read our full interview with Joy about the Season 2 finale here.

(The mother all spoiler alerts: Please do not read ahead unless you’ve seen the “Westworld” Season 2 finale, “The Passenger,” which aired Sunday.)

The second season of “Westworld” took a cue from the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s handbook on Sunday, capping an insane finale, titled “The Passenger,” with an equally insane post-credits scene. In the short clip, we see the Man in Black (Ed Harris) aka William, stumble out of an elevator into an abandoned room that the hit sci-fi series has never entered before. He comes across his daughter, Emily (Katja Herbers), who, uh, he actually killed in the penultimate episode. The Man in Black is understandably confused, and so was TheWrap. So we asked the show’s co-creator Lisa Joy to explain it to us.

TheWrap: We saw at the end of the actual episode, before the end credits scene that blew my mind, that William survived. He was one of the ones on the beach, in the tent in that particular situation and timeline. But then we get to the end credits: OK, he’s clearly a Host but I don’t know if that’s one version of him or another and then we see [his daughter] Emily there, can you give anything to explain that and at what point and in what timeline that might be happening?

Joy: Absolutely [laughs]. So you totally nailed what the story is, by the way, and then we threw in that last bit just to tease some other s–t that’s gonna happen, before you drown in it. So you totally got it, you totally got it. And that last bit, the reason we put it after the credits was because we wanted to be like, “No, you have it. You have the story and the timelines. This is some s-t that we’re going to do next” is what that other thing was.

But it recontextualizes itself when you realize that the entire season we’ve been going, we’ve been putting cards up in terms of our timelines. There’s been two major timelines. And it’s just the traditional story structure of a noir, right? Investigators come to town and they have basically a witness in Bernard who can’t remember what the f-k happened at the scene of the crime. And then you stumble back to the scene of the crime, which was this war that was happening.

And the Man in Black is a part of that war. They are all moving towards the “Valley Beyond.” And when he gets right to outside the facility [the Forge] and after killing his daughter — who, you know, he doesn’t know if it’s his daughter or not — he’s still confused and like, honestly, psychologically spun out by his own sins, his own constant transgressions and living in this virtual reality. He himself begins to grow unsure of what is real and what is not.

And this leads to, you know, “these violent delights, have violent ends.” And he, in his confused and tortured mind, kills his own daughter, for real, and then proceeds to start hacking into his own skin because he doesn’t understand anymore what’s real and what’s not. And it’s grating him and haunting him. It’s in some ways a full reversal of what was happening to Dolores. He’s in a prison of his own sins and that prison is now his own damn mind.

Of course in that final showdown with Dolores, she rigs his gun and he basically blows off his own arm. Now, what we tried to do there is establish this context: he collapses on the ground, [Dolores and Bernard] go down, Dolores and Bernard have all the events that unfold down there. After Bernard kills Dolores, he goes to the elevator and you’re like, “Wait, the Man in Black! I think he’s gotten up and he’s coming down this elevator and they’re gonna meet! They’re gonna meet!”

And then it’s totally weird because no one is in that elevator. And that’s our only little clue that something is not what we thought. That there is something else happening here. And that’s what we pay off later.

‘Cause in reality, a man got his arm shot off. He’s just lying on the ground somewhere. And later on, when Hale, or Halores is leaving the park, you see him on a cot. He’s injured, but he’s alive, and he’s real, and he’s going out into the real world — along with a handbag of pearls and Halores.

But then when you see that post-credit vignette, it’s really just a tease of what’s to come. We kind of rounded out that story. And you’re totally right about the end and this is a tease as to what’s to come, because we see that one tiny bit where we thought he might be coming down an elevator. We see that pay off and we see again Katja Herbers [Emily] who he thinks, “Are you my daughter? What the f–k is this?”

But he’s in a very different timeline. The whole place looks destroyed, and then she explains that all of that stuff happened long ago. That was real. But now something has happened and the Man is now the subject — or some iteration of the Man is now the subject — of testing. The roles have become completely reversed.

And we get the feeling that, in the far-flung future, the Man has been somehow reconjured and brought into this world and he’s being tested the same way the humans used to test the Hosts. And that is a storyline that one day we’ll see more of.

TheWrap: So because we do know that Emily died in the current timeline we’re in, is it fair to assume whoever is down there with this iteration of the Man in Black is similar to Dolores training Bernard? That has to be a Host or some other something if this is in the future and Emily died. Yes?

Oh yes, the Katja Herbers in the future talking to the Man in Black is now a Host version of Katja Herbers.

(The mother all spoiler alerts: Please do not read ahead unless you’ve seen the “Westworld” Season 2 finale, “The Passenger,” which aired Sunday.)

Well, after an ending like that, where do we even begin?

“Westworld” brought its second season to a close Sunday night with a feature-length finale that threw us completely off our programmed loop. But while the episode, titled “The Passenger,” answered many a question we’d been pondering throughout the sophomore year of co-creator Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s HBO sci-fi series, it left us with a whole new mess of head-scratchers.

Seeing as we are still very much in TBD territory on an air date for the third season, we’ve got a long wait in store before we can stop scratching ours heads. But to help, TheWrap caught up with Joy to help us make sense of that Bernard (Jeffrey Wright)/Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood)/Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) murder-resurrection triangle; Ford’s (Anthony Hopkins) final fate; Maeve (Thandie Newton) and the other dead Hosts’ chances of being revived; the “real world” setting we’re entering in Season 3; and what in the heck was going on with the Man in Black/William (Ed Harris) in that unexpected post-credits scene.

And — in a very Ford-like manner — she even gave TheWrap the answers to questions we didn’t think to ask. See our exchange below.

TheWrap: So there was a lot of death in that finale [laughs]. What was the reasoning behind killing off so many people, especially knowing some people ( i.e. humans) probably don’t have a way of coming back?

Joy: In embarking on this season we knew, in a sense, we’d be telling a story of revolution, of war and the tragedy and inevitability of war is death. There are stakes to violence and it is mortality. And I love all of our actors. I think they are incredible collaborators, cool people, incredible talent and it truly is harrowing to lose any of them. But, you know, it’s in the service of the story and the story is something that we’re all working together to paint as realistically as you can paint a story about an AI revolution in a Western theme park [laughs]. And so for the drama to have stakes, the deaths must be real. And so, yeah, there was a lot of deaths [laughs].

TheWrap: Did Bernard have to be the one to kill Dolores (and bring her back) and did Dolores have to be the one to kill Bernard (and bring him back) — and why?

Joy: Yeah, when we were thinking of that — and you see it in the back of some of the shots, the picture of an M.C. Escher drawing of a hand, drawing a hand, drawing a hand, drawing a hand — and the ways that the things we create and give birth to, create and influence us. And that is the cycle that Bernard and Dolores have been locked in since before Bernard was Bernard — when he was Arnold. The fates of all the characters are integral in the storylines, but some of them chose a kind of different struggle, you know?

And this season was about choice. It was about respecting choice, as well as making one’s own choice. And throughout the season, one of the things Dolores’ character struggles with in assuming the mantle of basically military leadership was, as much as she wanted to protect the Hosts, as noble as her aims were to protect them from the darkness that she herself has witnessed so many times in humans, in order to do that on a basic military level, she had to take on some of the paternalistic traits that she was kind of vowing against in the first place.

It was a difficult dichotomy, but I think something that would realistically occur. So she made a lot of choices for a lot of people and came to regret those choices. Not necessarily because they were wrong in their outcome, or what her intended outcome was, but because it was wrong, she realized, to take away someone else’s agency, even if you disagreed with the choices they were making.

So, you know, she changed Teddy in order to “save” him. She knew he wouldn’t survive. So she took away his agency and made him something, even though I think it was designed to be temporary like, “Let’s just live through this so we can have this life together.” And then she was going to kind of dictate the fates of Maeve and Akecheta and all the people who fled to the Sublime, because, to her, that reality was not one worth pursuing.

But she sees the error of her ways later because of Bernard. He literally killed her to stop the monster that she had become. And in being resurrected by him — when he also realizes that she wasn’t full monster, that indeed without her plan, they would be wiped off the face of the earth, she would be the last of his kind — he brings her back, and in that time she has changed. She has realized that embracing choice is necessary. That as much as her goal may have been noble, she has to accept the idea that they were fallible and that she is fallible, unless unchecked.

I think it’s a very powerful notion, the notion that our personal views, although closely held, are not necessarily right. That part of what is noble is making sure there are checks and balances and a plurality of opinions. And that is something that she has grown to understand.

So when she brings Bernard back in the real world, she’s basically accepting that idea and embracing that idea, even if it leads to her own personal undoing. She knows that that kind of balance is what is needed for true freedom for her kind.

TheWrap: OK, is it safe to assume that going forward in the next season we’ll be in the real world more?

Joy: Absolutely. It was always the plan to explore the real world and we have Dolores there, Bernard’s there and a creature that is certainly inhabiting Hale’s body is there [laughs]. So we’ll come to know more of who “Hale” is. There are three Hosts out in the world and next season will really be an exploration of what they find and who they become.

TheWrap: So then there has to be someone in Hale who isn’t Dolores at the end there, cause Dolores is now back in Dolores — right?

TheWrap: Where exactly did Dolores send the Hosts who went into the Sublime when she changed the coordinates?

Joy: I think what she’s done is she fulfilled their wish. They wanted to escape to a digital space where they could be truly free and create their own world, untarnished by human interference. And in changing the coordinates and kind of locking in and stowing them away, Dolores has finally found a way to accept their choice and give them what they so desired.

TheWrap: After the guest data in the Forge is erased, Hale/Dolores leaves with five control units in a purse. Who is in them? Maeve? Armistice? And can “Halores” remake them then?

Joy: There is Host data in the actual hosts who did not Sublime — so their CPUs are still intact. So, if they didn’t “sublime,” those pearls still contain their information. In each of those little balls in the purse is a Host, so there is a handful of them — but not an infinite amount of them. There are five. One Host per pearl.

TheWrap: When Halores left the beach, it seemed like Stubbs knew it was Dolores — or at least that it wasn’t Hale. Is that safe to assume?

Joy: Yes! It is safe to assume. And there is a step further that you can assume too. And we don’t say it explicitly, but if you are left wondering with all [Stubbs’] talk, his knowing talk about, “I’ve been at the park a very long time,” and Ford designed him with certain core drives, and he’s gonna stick to the role he’s been programmed with; it’s a little acknowledgement of just why he might have his suspicions about what’s going on with Hale, and then lets her pass.

And doesn’t it make sense if you are Ford and designing a park and you have a whole master plan about helping robots that you would keep one Host hiding in plain sight as a fail-safe? Maybe the Host who’s in charge of quality assurance? And by the way, that was totally meant to be subtle [laughs].

TheWrap: OK, that went completely over my head. Now, since we saw Bernard realize he had been imaginig Ford at the end there and was really doing all of those things by himself, does that mean Ford is gone for good this time?

Joy: Yes, Ford is gone. And yeah, I think it’s really — it’s interesting, because remember how in the first season with Dolores, in trying to come to consciousness she would hear Arnold’s voice while doing these things? And part of her embracing her agency and consciousness is realizing, “There is that voice. That’s not necessarily yours, that’s my voice. That’s my inner voice. And I have to achieve my own inner voice and inner instincts.” And embracing that voice is what brought her to full personhood.

And meanwhile, Jeffrey Wright’s character, Bernard, has been kind of struggling on his own. He didn’t even know he was a Host, because he was kind of very fragile when he was masquerading amongst the humans, so by the end of the season, you’re absolutely right, he manages to get rid of Ford — who did plant himself there as an emergency stopgap measure within the park to be upload into Bernard’s brain.

But once Bernard, who is an excellent coder, has ridden himself of Ford, he’s gone. And what we’re left with now is really a story about one Host, a new Host, kind of blooming into consciousness, who embraces his own inner voice, which he realizes has been guiding him in all the last major moves he’s made to ensure the future of his kind.

TheWrap: We saw at the end of the actual episode, before the end credits scene that blew my mind, that William survived. He was one of the ones on the beach, in the tent in that particular situation and timeline. But then we get to the end credits: OK, he’s clearly a Host but I don’t know if that’s one version of him or another and then we see [his daughter] Emily there, can you give anything to explain that and at what point and in what timeline that might be happening?

Joy: Absolutely [laughs]. So you totally nailed what the story is, by the way, and then we threw in that last bit just to tease some other s–t that’s gonna happen, before you drown in it. So you totally got it, you totally got it. And that last bit, the reason we put it after the credits was because we wanted to be like, “No, you have it. You have the story and the timelines. This is some s–t that we’re going to do next” is what that other thing was.

But it recontextualizes itself when you realize that the entire season we’ve been going, we’ve been putting cards up in terms of our timelines. There’s been two major timelines. And it’s just the traditional story structure of a noir, right? Investigators come to town and they have basically a witness in Bernard who can’t remember what the f–k happened at the scene of the crime. And then you stumble back to the scene of the crime, which was this war that was happening.

And the Man in Black is a part of that war. They are all moving towards the “Valley Beyond.” And when he gets right to outside the facility [the Forge] and after killing his daughter — who, you know, he doesn’t know if it’s his daughter or not — he’s still confused and like, honestly, psychologically spun out by his own sins, his own constant transgressions and living in this virtual reality. He himself begins to grow unsure of what is real and what is not.

And this leads to, you know, “these violent delights, have violent ends.” And he, in his confused and tortured mind, kills his own daughter, for real, and then proceeds to start hacking into his own skin because he doesn’t understand anymore what’s real and what’s not. And it’s grating him and haunting him. It’s in some ways a full reversal of what was happening to Dolores. He’s in a prison of his own sins and that prison is now his own damn mind.

Of course in that final showdown with Dolores, she rigs his gun and he basically blows off his own arm. Now, what we tried to do there is establish this context: he collapses on the ground, [Dolores and Bernard] go down, Dolores and Bernard have all the events that unfold down there. After Bernard kills Dolores, he goes to the elevator and you’re like, “Wait, the Man in Black! I think he’s gotten up and he’s coming down this elevator and they’re gonna meet! They’re gonna meet!”

And then it’s totally weird because no one is in that elevator. And that’s our only little clue that something is not what we thought. That there is something else happening here. And that’s what we pay off later.

‘Cause in reality, a man got his arm shot off. He’s just lying on the ground somewhere. And later on, when Hale, or Halores is leaving the park, you see him on a cot. He’s injured, but he’s alive, and he’s real, and he’s going out into the real world — along with a handbag of pearls and Halores.

But then when you see that post-credit vignette, it’s really just a tease of what’s to come. We kind of rounded out that story. And you’re totally right about the end and this is a tease as to what’s to come, because we see that one tiny bit where we thought he might be coming down an elevator. We see that pay off and we see again Katja Herbers [Emily] who he thinks, “Are you my daughter? What the f–k is this?”

But he’s in a very different timeline. The whole place looks destroyed, and then she explains that all of that stuff happened long ago. That was real. But now something has happened and the Man is now the subject — or some iteration of the Man is now the subject — of testing. The roles have become completely reversed.

And we get the feeling that, in the far-flung future, the Man has been somehow reconjured and brought into this world and he’s being tested the same way the humans used to test the Hosts. And that is a storyline that one day we’ll see more of.

TheWrap: So, because we do know that Emily died in the current timeline we’re in, is it fair to assume whoever is down there with this iteration of the Man in Black is similar to Dolores training Bernard? That has to be a Host or some other something if this is in the future and Emily died. Yes?

Joy: Oh yes, the Katja Herbers in the future talking to the Man in Black is now a Host version of Katja Herbers.

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details about tonight’s season 2 finale of Westworld on HBO
From the moment Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) died at the end of Westworld‘s season 1, a robot apocalypse has ensued throughout this past season, w…

Juliet is dead on “Westworld” — but that doesn’t mean Sela Ward’s relationship with the show needs to be.

After her character’s chilling death by suicide on Sunday’s episode — Season 2’s penultimate installment that also served as our introduction to the older version of William’s (Ed Harris) wife — we know we won’t be seeing her in the HBO sci-fi series’ current timeline. But thanks to the many flashbacks the show features, it’s not out of the question that Juliet will return.

“We absolutely talked about the possibility,” Ward said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, published after the episode, about conversations with co-creator Lisa Joy. “I don’t know that they have made that decision. I think they keep all of that very close to the vest, and we’ll see. I have no idea.”

This episode, titled “Vanishing Point,” took us into the show’s very recent past for an inside look at an evening with the MIB (aka an older version of Jimmi Simpson’s William) and his family life outside of the park. Set on the night his lovely (but disturbed) wife Juliet killed herself, we find out she did it because she saw who he really was and what he has done, thanks to an ID chip that revealed his doings inside of Westworld.

“I don’t think she thinks he’s a robot,” Ward said of how Juliet perceived William before she died (as him possibly being a Host is not out of the question at this point in the game). “I think she saw, through that data card, what a real monster that he had become. She saw all of the… he was really beyond redemption, all of the horrors that you could ever imagine a human being committing. Killing and torture. Looking at the reality of she doesn’t even know who she is married to. It’s real life, profoundly shocking.”

Before Juliet takes her own life, we also see her and William’s adult daughter, Emily (Katja Herbers), is concerned about her mother — a recovering alcoholic whose behavior becomes embarrassing at a party — and wants to get her back into treatment. Juliet refuses to go, and insists she is fine, placing the blame for her troubles onto William and insisting to their daughter he doesn’t love either of them and never has.

Ward says it is correct to assume Juliet died thinking her daughter believes she’s “just a drunk” and doesn’t know why.

“This mother-daughter relationship is very complicated,” Ward said. “I think she felt very betrayed by her daughter, betrayed by life in a way, between her husband, who she doesn’t even know and who has been this monster revealed to her, and her daughter wants to send her back to rehab because she considers it equivalent to an institution. There is really no safe space, nowhere to turn. I can’t even imagine the loneliness of that. Despair is such an interesting state of being for a human being. It’s so incredibly debilitating to think that’s what you’re seeing a portrait of and why she just feels there’s no way out.”

(Spoiler alert: Please do not read ahead unless you’ve seen Sunday’s episode of Season 2 of “Westworld,” “Vanishing Point.”)

Bernard Lowe has finally cut Robert Ford out of his life — literally.

Toward the end of Sunday’s episode of “Westworld,” Jeffrey Wright’s character reached a breaking point with his old partner and friend. The head of the park’s programming division — and a Host himself — has been living with the late Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) “inside” his brain for the better part of 2 installments, but he decided enough was enough when Westworld’s creator tried to get him to kill Elsie (Shannon Woodward) — again.

TheWrap spoke with Wright ahead of the episode, which was Season 2’s penultimate, to figure out how Bernard was finally able to break his unhealthy bond with Ford, and where things are headed in next week’s finale.

First off, Wright’s pretty happy Ford was unsuccessful in his second attempt (that we know of) to get Bernard to murder Elsie, who Ford insists is going to betray Bernard on their way to secure the Forge. (That’s the storage facility for all the data the park has been mining from its guests’ brains, which Evan Rachel Wood’s Dolores is also gunning to capture. Or destroy — unclear right now.)

Instead, in a very-unlike-himself manner, Bernard screams “get out of my f–king head” at Ford’s consciousness, cuts a hole in his own arm, plugs himself in and starts to use a control tablet to “delete” Ford. Bernard insists to his imaginary friend that he can stop Dolores all on his own and Ford says, actually, Bernard’s the “only one who can,” then suddenly disappears. (Though it’s not entirely clear whether it was Ford, or Bernard, that deleted the “data package” containing Ford’s consciousness from Bernard’s system.) Then Bernard drives off toward the Forge, leaving Elsie annoyed — but safe — behind him.

But while we may not know yet if it was Bernard who deleted Ford, Wright says it’s safe to say Bernard was the one who decided to kick Ford out.

“I think part of that decision was born out of Bernard exercising choice,” Wright said. “And so Bernard is quietly and consistently emerging now, and he is thrusting himself into the middle of things. And, likewise, the rest of the world is heading in that direction too. So he’s driving toward his self-determined fate.”

“Absolutely. That’s Bernard’s version of an awakening,” he said. “He’s been a little slow out of the gate relative to the other [hosts], but his desire for freedom runs through Ford. So that’s part of the unresolved business that needed to be sorted out. That was absolutely necessary to where he needed to be headed, so we’ll see where he ends up with it.”

Speaking of where he ends up, was Wright content with where we leave Bernard at the end of Season 2 — and will you, the viewer, be as well, seeing as we don’t know when Season 3 is coming?

(Spoiler alert: Please do not read ahead unless you’ve seen last Sunday’s episode of “Westworld.”)

Alright, either someone royally screwed up during the filming of last Sunday’s episode of “Westworld” Season 2 or fans just found an incredible Easter egg because some weird stuff was going on in the background.

The most recent installment of Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s HBO sci-fi series was a day in the limelight episode for Ghost Nation member Akecheta (Zahn McClarnon). Entitled “Kiksuya,” the story centered around his history in the park and how he came to the mission he is on today to help all the other hosts “find the door” out of the park.

But because you were so focused on all the moving moments going on the foreground, you may have missed what was either a giant oversight or extreme attention to detail.

About halfway through the episode, we see Akecheta wandering around the park, and making his way to Sweetwater. Here is where you’re going to need to pause and look the left side of the screen, as eagle-eyed Reddit user flickersense noticed you can see Maeve (Thandie Newton) in her Season 1 saloon getup, followed by a cameraman and crew. No, really, look at this GIF if you don’t believe us:

So one of two things happened here. Well, one of probably 1,000 things is happening here, but for the sake of us not freezing all mother functions all day long, let’s get to the two most logical options.

The first is that these guys are totally supposed to be in the scene and are following Host madam Maeve to shoot footage for a promo video for the park. See, that checks out, right? It makes more sense that Nolan and Joy (who are crazy about tricking you with tiny little details) would throw this in as a treat for viewers who pay attention instead of the second choice: someone screwed up.

Yeah, mistakes happen, so there is a chance that while shooting from multiple angles for this episode (or a previous one, like the one where the Cradle was revealed) and someone missed this in the edit bay. This mistake is backed up further when you notice that it looks like McClarnon is headed toward a green screen, so he may not even be walking in Sweetwater here, but rather they added the footage of the park later. It’s hard to believe someone would make such a big mistake a show that costs so much money to produce, but it’s always a possibility.

So, which side are you on: hidden detail or someone in the edit department is getting a talking-to?

Dr. Robert Ford was dead: to begin with. (We’re, like, 99.9 percent sure, at this point.)

But his mind? Well, that’s a horse of a different color.

Anthony Hopkins made his triumphant return to “Westworld” as everyone’s favorite late, great amusement park creator (sorry, Walt) on Sunday’s episode, “Phase Space.” And while his shocking cameo lasted but a few seconds and he only uttered three words, his unexpected appearance on Jonthan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s HBO series will be enough to launch a thousand fan theories come morning.

Now, if Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) shot Ford in the back of the head at the end of Season 1 and his lifeless body is currently rotting inside the park, then how did Hopkins resurrect his performance?

Toward the end of the episode, Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) has Elsie (Shannon Woodward) slice his robot host brain out of his head and upload it to “The Cradle” (Westworld’s mainframe, hive mind, the thing that controls all the things, etc.) so they can figure out what is keeping them from regaining control of the system.

Once he’s “inside” the park’s head, he starts walking through a simulated version of Sweetwater and toward the Mariposa Saloon. He passes versions of Dolores and Teddy (James Marsden) before entering the establishment to see his partner’s face reflecting back at him in the glass of the piano (See below).

We’re not sure where things go from here, but we know Ford is dead (we saw the maggots eating his face, OK?!?) so what we are seeing here is most likely an uploaded version of his consciousness. And based on all those successful(?) attempts to put James Delos inside a host earlier this season in the episode “Riddle of the Sphinx,” we know that can be done.